Eating our own dog food (for lunch) | Hacker News Reader

Eating our own dog food (for lunch)

p.ota.to

21 pointsdylancollins18 comments

I agree that getting up and moving is good for you, so having lunch delivered to your desk is probably not the best idea.

That said, it reminds me of a funny story. At Sun (Mtn View) we would go to La Cosentena[1] and get burritos, you could fax in an order for 'will call' and pick it up which made things a bit smoother. An engineer decided to show off the distributed object technology Sun was building with an example app called 'burrito tool' that you could select your burrito and it would fax it to La Cosentena for pickup.

It was great, and fun, and we bragged about it. Then some enterprising Sales Engineer made a copy and took it with him for use at a trade show. We showed up for lunch and none of our burritos were made, they explained they had been getting hundreds of faxed in burrito orders all morning and stopped making them when nobody came to pick them up. Sure enough, Burrito Tool, even from the floor of the conference in New York city, found the Object request broker back at HQ and forwarded Burrito requests to the real object back in Mtn View. Holy bogus burritos!

[1] http://www.yelp.com/biz/la-coste%C3%B1a-mountain-view-2

Office assistants bringing food to your desk. So you don't have to leave your desk ever, for any reason. Call me crazy but I quite like standing up and leaving my desk to get some lunch.

That's fine. We don't chain people to their desks, but if you're in the zone then lunch can be delivered.

Leaving your desk and going for a stroll (outside or inside) is great for mental peace. Standing in a long queue with a horde of other people for 15 minutes is not. This is an elegant solution to the problem :)

(Disclaimer: I am a Potato.)

I'm also in the "I like to get up and out of the office even for a few minutes" camp, though I hate waiting in line.

I've seen the opposite - where I've been in a capital markets job where I couldn't leave my desk, and the office assistant screwed up the order at least twice a week.

I solve the waiting in line problem by eating lunch slightly later than normal. I find that around 13.30 I can hit even the most popular of lunch places and hardly find any lines.

One solution is employees order the food and then go pick it up, skipping lines. Change of scenery is often great for mental stimulation. Sitting at a desk 20 hours straight only works for those on adderal.

Kudos to your intern for building this.

Fair point, I spend most of my week working from home, and when in the office we have a rota for people making lunch which we thence sit down to eat, so I'm a little out of touch with the lunchtime rush!

I'm totally behind the idea of lunch at work, I just think its something that can be handled far better than dumping a meal at your desk

So you don't have to leave your desk ever, for any reason.

That's quite the stretch.

The option to have lunch brought to your desk is great when you're in the middle of something and don't want to get out of the zone.

On the other hand, I don't see how it forbids you from getting up and taking a break.

I definitely don't want to know how they've handled potty breaks if, like you say, you don't ever have to get up from your desk.

handled

Can't unsee. :-)

My old^3 workplace has had an equivalent for years, but running via IRC/SMS (it's been around since before phones were good at complex webpages) - a small, tight Java codebase. Sometimes I despair at how many extra layers of cruft seem to be spent making everything webby (memcache for an app this simple? really?), when the end result is the same level of functionality.

I also raised an eyebrow at the mention of memcache - but hey, if the outcome is that the intern learns a thing or two, why not.

The memcache was purely the result of polling the server every second to keep different JS clients in sync. Admittedly it's not very elegant, but it was something I did just to see how easy it is (backbone makes this really really easy).

Unfortunately you pay for every datastore query, and when 50 odd people have the order page up, each polling every second, thing get a little silly. Additionally with appengine memcache is just one import away.

Please add some left-padding to the content...

How long did it take to build the app with all functions?

Just as important, how much did the intern learn while building it? Sounds like they got to touch a number of different APIs, libraries, and concepts.

A stupendous amount. Before starting this project I had never done any complex frontend stuff. Pretty much just HTML CSS and a bit of jQuery.

With this one project I learned about backbone, marionette and the limits of what can be done on the frontend. It was quite a big learning curve, and even now I'm still discovering where the correct balance of frontend-back end stuff is.

Overall a great experience, really opened my eyes to the power of JavaScript, before I had adamantly stuck to nothing more exciting than HTML forms with JS validation.

About two months off and on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com